jueves, 1 de enero de 2015

Man on wire

Man on wire

Last night I had the privilege of watching one of those films that are truly inspiring. I hadn't watched many movies recently, so I decided I had to pick it up with something worth it. I stared at my DVD collection and the title "Man on wire" caught my attention.

As usual, I play the movie without knowing anything about it other than it is rated highly on my sources notes and that if it's in my movie collection, it's because... this is probably a great film. Well, it happens it's not really a movie... it's a documental. That much I will spoil about it.

Man on wire is a very fascinating exploration into the human mind and the inner feelings of finding a dream, pursuing it, following your gut, being inspired and free the human spirit as almost no other film can do it. From a cinematic point of view, the direction, the music, the editing, are nothing short of superb. From a human point of view, it's something new that you don't see every day.

Something that I have found interesting about us humans as a society is that we place so much interest and admiration to imaginary heroes, like Luke Skywalker, Batman, Godzilla, but when it comes to real life heroes our interest isn't really that high -or at least, as it should be-. This is something I first experimented when I watched Lawrence of Arabia and discussed it over an online boards with a few users, and one of them was complaining how "weak and gay" Lawrence looked like. This was met with a great reply by another member who said "that's the way how real life heroes are, they are human, with defects and weaknesses. They become heroes because they're strengths are more significant." We don't know much about Lawrence of Arabia because he was a short, plain, normal guy, just chasing an extraordinary dream, just like Phillipe Petit did in Man on wire.

Another great aspect from Man on wire is the clear establishment of leadership and management. You can differentiate who is the leaders and who are the followers, and how decided the leader is in conquering his goal regardless of the obstacles that appear on the road. You can also see what it feels to be supported and backed up, sometimes by friends and other times by total strangers, who may or may not agree with you at times, but share the common interest of reaching the goal and feeling part of a group of people that achieved something.

There is another little spoiler I will give about Man on wire and it's the second star of the film: The WTC Twin Towers. Today they only exist in the memories of those who saw them, but in the film they are as vivid and powerful and imposing as they were during their almost 30 years of existence. Apart from appreciating the entire journey of Phillipe Petit and his friends, you also come to appreciate the objective the Twin Towers had when they were built and how big their influence was in the lives of many people around the planet. It's mind blowing how a couple of buildings can have such dramatic impact, even before they even existed. I guess that's the small sentimental part that makes Man on wire a very human film: to understand that what Petit did, will not be done ever again.

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